Half Past Twelve, How the Years Gone By
by greenasphodel
Summary: They parted for a night on Halloween of 1981, and a night became forever. The life of Remus, as he begins to pick himself up after his lover is sent to Azkaban. RLSB SBRL Wolfstar.


**Half Past Twelve, How the Years Gone By**

* * *

_Half past twelve: how the time has gone by._

_Half past twelve: how the years have gone by._

—Constantine P. Cavafy, _Since Nine O'Clock _

* * *

**_1. How circumstance decided to part them_**

In the aftermath of Halloween 1981, Remus gave up magic and built a lie for him to live in.

He couldn't bear to see anybody, and moped in the flat—_their_ flat—in a way that some people would call selfish. But he couldn't bring himself to care about any of their menial, frivolous faces that were all too eager to make him a sullied boy of distress, tricked by this conniving, evil man. He couldn't control his repulsion of their wands—his wand—their smooth singing of magic spitefully taunting him.

(They had snapped Sirius's wand in two, right before Sirius's eyes—before _his_ eyes. The whole beautiful twelve inches of ebony and dragon heartstring. It only took one swift motion from the pudgy official—his face alit with self-righteousness and malicious glee—and the wand was in two, the bitter middle in splinters and ugly unevenness. Remus could still hear Sirius whispering in his ear, '_Combative, magnificent for transfiguration, non-conformist soul: that batty old man really does know his wands_', the rumbling of Sirius voice low and tickling his earlobe and his pride growling in every syllable.)

Remus didn't go to The Funeral. That was selfish too, the voices said.

He did try to visit Azkaban twice, though. The first time, he begged the officials in a degrading manner that he had never thought himself capable of, with tears and snot and babbling words and disgusting kneeling in the end. Of course they refused him. Later, much later, when he learned of Crouch's visits, he gave a bitter laugh that he learned from Sirius, and started hating the Ministry even more. He went away from Azkaban in hysterics and despair. He didn't try to visit again for quite some time.

A couple of people came by to offer condolences and sometimes empty tears. None of them mattered. Hagrid tried to return the motorbike to him, but he couldn't even look at it without wanting to puke and light it on fire. He couldn't hate Sirius, so he hated his bike.

Dorcas came by once. She brought _wine_ of all things, and had the least social tact out of any person Remus had ever met. And he had thought he was fairly bad at social graces. She fumbled with words, then turned a darker color than the rosé that she brought, and Remus showed her the door. Dorcas left without her wine, and Remus placidly put it in the fridge, as if the person shrieking like a harpy a moment ago was not him.

The moment he closed the fridge door was when he realized he couldn't live in their flat anymore. He looked around wildly, the curling wallpaper circling around him like a jungle of symbols. He couldn't play housewife like he did during the war anymore, not without a house to tend to and a man to pretend to be a wife to. He had originally taken up household chores as his share of the rent. He had told his parents that he was working to become a Healer at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, but in reality nobody was hiring in the middle of war, so instead he became the much-judged housewife. That obviously didn't work anymore. The whole world—their whole lot—disgusted him so, _so_ much.

So naturally, he put the flat on the market, with a realtor who had a bad hair dye and smelled like burnt cookies. He felt like he owned it to someone, anyone, to take care of the finances, so he made sure the realtor had a clear strategy. The realtor was a Muggle.

In fact, the last wizard that he interacted with was Dorcas, and he intended to keep it that way.

**_2. Waiting for the eternal disaster_**

He had started living out of this cheap rental motel that had papery curtains that failed to keep out any sun and so he always woke up too early. The motel served stale bagels in the lobby before nine. The fat man who had late morning shifts felt bad enough for him to hand over some peanut butter squares that the man nicked from the nearby diner. Remus didn't want to know how he looked to make the man so sorry for him.

There was nothing to do—nothing at all, and he didn't want to talk to anybody. So he pretended to be a tourist on a budget and went sightseeing around London. Despite living in the Guildford for the whole eleven years before Hog—before school, he had never seen the sights of London.

Central Hall Westminster had free guided tours, and Greenwich Park didn't charge admission fees. He soon found all the free attractions, and went to more parks than he cared for (Regent's, Kensington, Richmond, names that he picked up instead of people). Too bad it was getting too cold for park walks. The museums were also free, but he didn't feel comfortable being trapped with so many people and so much flashing light, so he only went in the half hour after opening and before closing. It was enough time to try to decipher the beginnings and ends of lines in Turner paintings, and enough time to pretend he was the stoic and laudable heroines in Waterhouse illustrations of old fables. He didn't know half of the fables, and had to look the lot of them up when he got back to the motel and sneaked into the dismal 'business center' with carpet stained by the death of a million bugs and an old computer.

This populated his life.

The nights were easier. He got a pack of piss beer from the bloke with the accent who ran the 24/7 convenience store down the street, and his low tolerance didn't betray him. A few gulps down, and he would achieve that warm, fuzzy feeling of _where-am-I _and _gosh-the-stars-are-pretty _.

He fancied himself a degenerate—he tried to be one, at least, and this was as far as he got.

(This was the closest he could be to _Sirius_. This was his way of living for Sirius, the only way he knew how to worship him nowadays. When he was one beer down, he could whisper Sirius's name without manually twisting his thoughts another way, pleading vague pleas with some vague being high above.)

**_3. The poetic eyes, the pale face, in the darkening street_**

One day in December, he got a burning impulse to see Wellington House. A sense of nostalgic ate him, because the stately glamour was what he thought 12 Grimmauld Place in Islington must be like —and Malfoy Manor, and Greengrass Manor, and _every single one of them because Grimmauld was not special_, he hissed out to the paper curtains that flapped rather understandingly.

He spent six whole quids on the ticket when he discovered that he didn't have the guts to evade the fare. The woman behind the counter—she had too-bright orange lipstick and a plastic flower in her hair, and Remus wanted to magic her away—asked for his name to print the ticket.

"Remus Black," he lied, and found one more way to be close to—

He wandered through the halls and felt like he knew what Nearly Headless Nick must have felt like, seeing people but passing through them like vapor. In the Duke's bedroom, with Goya's collection of lunatics staring straight at him, Remus thought that he could hear the fate of Napoleon quietly speaking to him.

_Josephine, _it said, _Josephine,_ it whined.

Remus staggered back, and the whispering subsided. Some unknown part of this room must have held too much ancient magic, he thought, and now he was getting drunk off of it.

The horror of love, Remus realized, was that just because he loved you didn't mean he wouldn't go ahead and betray you. He was sure of his love—for James and Peter and Harry and Mr. and Mrs. Potter and that tiny, growing bit for Lily; for those people at least, if not for himself. He could be sure because he had never seen anybody love quite so _fiercely_ before. And since he was sure of the love, he was also sure of its horror.

There had to be a reason, Remus thought desperately, somehow it all made sense, for Sirius to do it, because Merlin and Cassandra knew it didn't made sense to him. Sirius had his reasons, and Remus felt a little relieved, but also very sick.

It must be all that old magic in this place.

When he came back to spend another six quid the next day, he was Remus Black again. The orange-lipped girl recognized him and gave him the concession ticket that was almost a quid cheaper.

Remus felt bad about his thoughts from yesterday, so he silently made the woman's hair-flower real. As an afterthought, he put a discreet permanence charm on it, so that it would stay fresh and blooming always.

That was the first bit of magic that he had done in a long while, and he hoped that nobody could smell the rusty magic that was like an iron left on for too long.

When he left half an hour later, he saw the woman blushing as the man who took over her shift touched the flower gingerly. He had bad skin and a terribly large nose, but Remus was more prone to notice the faults now than he was at fifteen. The sight made him at once happy and never wanted to touch magic again.

That night, the beer brought the memory of Sirius touching his hair in the Prefect's bathroom, the expression on Sirius's similar to how Remus worshipped him. Remus couldn't tell if his mind painted that expression on Sirius, or Sirius actually wore it at the time. It made him yearn in a way that was familiar and unwelcome.

**_4. His entirely by chance_**

(He had to do _something_ with his life, didn't he? The options weren't many.)

He decided to go back to school, the only place that he ever felt like he belonged—to teach this time. With the money that selling their flat made him, he applied to as many universities as he could. The transcripts were easy to forge, a skill that he picked up by watching—

He would teach Classics. He hadn't studied Muggle analytics of the Golden Age of magic, but he had always gotten O's in Ancient Runes and History of Magic. About a month later, he got a fat envelope from Imperial College London, almost choking on crumbs of peanut granola bar. That was perhaps the first time that he realized that he was going somewhere, that something was finally _happening_.

He found a flat in Peckham, as cheap and shady as the one that Si—

He commuted from Peckham to South Kensington. He had appeared with such wide-eyed loss and neediness that the landlady, an old woman who lacked affection from her own children, cut the rent. Normally, Remus would be offended at pity, but at that time, he felt like he deserved all the pity the world could give him.

The flat was tiny, and did _not_ have wallpaper of any sort. Nor did it have a couch, and Remus trained himself to not feel disappointment bubbling slowly like sparkling water left out for a day.

**_5. Lost, as though he never existed_**

In his spare time, Remus went to a couple of therapy sessions: the anonymous group meetings that were free and in the community center. The people were all slobbering, sobbing messes, and Remus wrinkled his nose at them. Tragedy was supposed to be more _dignified_ than that. He did meet a fellow wizard there though: he could feel magic cackling unstably in his hands every time he turned away from the group. Remus didn't think he even knew that he was a wizard.

He didn't go again after that. The meetings didn't help anyway.

Lecturing, on the other hand, suited him. His students didn't care about his class, and his colleagues were nice, in a distant kind of way.

Remus avoided the men with gray eyes.

**_6. Better if the journey lasts for years_**

He found purpose to his life.

He took to replacing every single coin that they—he ever took from Uncle Alphard's account (he would always think of Uncle Alphard fondly, who had given him a few of the best years of his life). Imperial College was a wealthy university, and so before they fired him for too many moon-related absences, he saved up the lunch money to put it in Gringotts. It made him feel like he achieved something. Every once in a while, when the pull to be Remus Black swelled to be unbearable, he would go to Gringotts, bother the grumpy goblins to open up vault 711 so that he might count every single coin in there. With every coin he put into the bank, he felt an extra handful of peace restored to him.

But life went on, didn't it?

When his stint at Imperial College ended, he was again faced with an overwhelming sense of loss, so he applied to all the other schools again. This time, the University of Sussex took him. It was a step down the academic ladder to go to Sussex, but he didn't complain. Soon enough he would make his way down to the lowest of academies, and then secondary school and finally the rare community centers that offered Latin courses.

**_7. They parted for a night, and a night became forever_**

He tried to visit Azkaban again, pretending to be an astrology researcher that nobody heard of. He was again refused, of course, but he did meet the physician there. He was first surprised to see a physician at all, for the idea of taking care of the inmates never occurred to him. Lloyd—the Healer physician—gave him a wry look and told him that not many people did have such an idea. He was only a visiting physician though, he assured Remus, and came whenever anybody was in serious danger of dying, if only to confirm death.

Lloyd promised to slip in his letter to Sirius, if he agreed to go out to dinner with him.

Remus did agree, without even hesitating. He found that he enjoyed the dinner far more than he thought he would. Lloyd was very knowledgeable and worldly (he knew all the inmates, and the old habits that didn't vanish with their sanity), and had been very kind and helpful (he swore that he delivered the letter, and that Black ate the paper to the last bit).

Remus didn't see him again. He would have hung up on Lloyd if he ever called, but he never did.

**_8. To remain for the other always what he was_**

In the years that followed, nobody ever once suspected him of wizardry, because Remus never once performed it. The years had washed away his habit of unconsciously reaching for his inner pocket. People just thought that he had a habit of swishing his wrists (and he swished them well, he swished them well…)

It was strange that it took the undoing of Sirius Black and everything else he knew for him to build a life, but what part of his life wasn't strange?

Especially the part of an owl fluttering through the closed window and leaving a Sunday paper in his lap. He recognized the owl, even after eight years, as the tawny owl whose reliable personality reflected that of its owner, one Albus Dumbledore. On the front page was a forcibly stilled (magic upon magic, he smiled faintly, appreciating both the Headmaster's consideration of his lifestyle and the irony) picture of a gaunt looking man screaming, and Remus was confused for a moment, because he thought the man looked familiar and his heart sped up at the face for some reason.

Then he saw the headline, and _Oh_, he thought, _he escaped. _He didn't know if he should be scared or put on tea or if he was being egocentric.

Halloween of 1993, Remus repeated his masochistic ritual of counting every single coin in Uncle Alphard's Gringotts vault, and found exactly two thousand one hundred fifty seven Galleons missing. It was a large amount by anybody's standard (even the Families were not doing so well these days), so Remus knew it was not his counting error. In fact, he counted thrice, and each time came to within ten Galleons of that original number.

He was back, he knew.


End file.
